by Sam Sykes
I felt the chill of his sword, even felt it brush against my throat. But I didn’t even blink. This wasn’t the man I saw when I slept, the last thing I saw in that dark place.
This man, whoever he was, couldn’t kill me.
“Vraki,” he whispered, voice hoarse. “Is he…”
I nodded slowly. “He is.”
His body shook. I could see his fingers tense, struggle to hold on to the blade that suddenly looked too big for him.
“Did he…” Jindu paused, swallowed. “Did he say anything?”
“He did,” I replied.
Breathlessly, he asked, “What?” After a long moment, he stepped forward, tilted my chin back with the blade. “What did he say?”
I didn’t move backward. I didn’t blink. And when I answered him, I didn’t whisper.
“It doesn’t matter.”
Those were shitty last words. I always thought I’d say something more epic. Something that would make undergarments tighter when people watched the opera of my life just before the curtain fell. But they felt right. And if they were what I said before I got a sword run through me, then that was just fine.
Liette was alive. Cavric was alive. Vraki was dead. That wasn’t so bad. And it was fitting that it would end like it began.
With Jindu’s blade. With my blood.
I closed my eyes. I waited.
And I heard the blade fall.
I looked down, saw it glimmering in the dirt. The man before me stepped back, hands shaking too hard to hold the weapon that had cut me. His eyes darted, as if he couldn’t bear to lay eyes on me anymore. But everywhere he looked, he saw the bodies, the ruin, the blood that had been wrought by Vraki.
Vraki, whom he had followed.
Vraki, whom he had betrayed me for.
Vraki, who lay in a pile of dirt in a pauper’s basement, all his plans come to nothing.
“How?” Jindu’s eyes searched the distant ruin of Lowstaff, as though he could find an answer in the carnage for a question he didn’t know. “He was supposed to save us… He was going to fix things… He told me…” His hands trembled, in need of a blade to hold, a weapon that would fix everything. They found only his skull, clutching his temples. “And I… I fought for him… I killed for him…”
I watched him there, collapsing to his knees and searching the dirt for an answer that, up until now, Vraki had provided for him. And now that he was dead, and left nothing more than Dust, Jindu didn’t even know the question anymore. And I, standing and watching him silently, didn’t have any answers for him.
But someone had an answer for me.
And he whispered it on a burning breath.
Almost unconsciously, I reached for him. And, as if he had been waiting for that, he leapt to my hand. The Cacophony seethed, giggling in anticipation as I walked toward Jindu, raised my weapon, and leveled it at his head.
“I ruined it…” Jindu whispered. “The Imperium, the mages, the… I betrayed… I fought… you…”
The broken babble of his voice became background noise, just another moaning wind and crackling fire. An empty collection of words shattered by the click of a hammer being drawn back.
“Salazanca.”
Until he said my name.
I wasn’t ready for the sight of his eyes, uncomfortably bright and clear and looking straight at me. I wasn’t ready to wonder how, for all the times I had seen him in my dreams, he must have seen me. I wasn’t ready for him to see me like he did.
What had I been in his dreams? An obstacle? A shadow? Just a collection of regrets put together in a human shape? I didn’t know. But when he looked at me now, he looked at me like he used to, and I know what he saw.
A woman. White-haired. Covered in dust. Tattoos running down her arms. Her body decorated with scars.
That he had put there.
“I… I can’t…”
And when I looked at him, down in the dirt and without a weapon, I saw something else, too. I’m not going to tell you it was anything as saccharine or satisfying as true love or shit like that. I just saw a man.
A man who had been there when I remembered still being happy. A man I had stood beside and fought with and yelled at and screamed at. A man who had been there when I still had the sky instead of the scars.
The last part of my life that had ever been normal.
My hand shook. The gun burned. My breath left me. And I kept staring at him until I didn’t know what I was looking at anymore.
But when he vanished and only a bare patch of earth remained… I let him go.
And I was left alone with the dying fires and the cold night sky and the gun burning in my hand.
I felt a surge of agony rush through my hand, into my bones. The Cacophony roared soundlessly through my skin, carved through my sinew with burning knives. He was displeased, of course—this death was the whole reason we had made this deal and I had just let it go away. The pain of his anger hurt, I won’t lie, but when I thought about pulling the trigger, when I thought about taking the very last time I felt normal and casting it to the wind…
Well, like I said, his wasn’t the worst pain I had felt.
It wasn’t even going to be the worst pain I felt that night.
“Why?”
That pain came when I heard Liette’s voice. And when I turned around to see her—her face smudged with ash and dirt, strands of hair falling around her face, one lens of her glasses cracked so that she looked at me with those eyes, big and fractured—I thought I might die.
“You had him,” she whispered like every word was a razor pulled out of her throat. “You had him right there… and you didn’t kill him.”
“You came back.” I hadn’t intended that to sound as accusatory as it did.
“Of course I came back.” She hadn’t intended that to sound as angry as it did. “How the fuck was I not going to come back? I always come back. Just like you do. And neither of us has the decency to die so the other will just stop doing this.”
“Liette, I—”
“Why?” She stepped toward me, hesitant, like she was walking across profaned ground. Maybe she was. “Every morning I woke up next to you and saw you staring out the window. Every time you left me without a word. Everything we could have had and don’t. All because of him. All of that, every last piece, could have been fixed if you’d just killed him… but you let it go.”
It hurt to look at her, so I looked away. But it hurt more to have her look at me. And when she reached out, trembling like she was going to touch something so delicate, and laid those expert fingers on my cheeks and forced me to look back at her…
Something inside me broke.
“Why?” she asked again.
I couldn’t speak. My throat was too tight. The wind was too loud. Everything was too much.
“Tell me,” she whispered. “I came back, Sal. I’ll keep coming back. No matter how much it hurts, no matter how many times I fail, I’ll come back every time if you just tell me.”
It felt like being punched. Like she knocked the wind out of me with her very first word and I couldn’t find my breath anymore.
“Tell me how to make this work.” Her voice was breathless in that way it was when machines don’t work and nothing ever goes right. “Tell me what I have to do. Tell me what I have to say. There has to be something I can do, some way to fix this, some way to make you normal.”
In hindsight, I had an answer for her.
In hindsight, I would have told her that it’s like… I’ve got this knife in my chest. It hurts me when I walk, when I breathe, when my heart beats. But I can’t take it out, I’ve lived with it so long. It’s the only thing holding in my blood. And if it ever comes out, I don’t know if there’ll be anything left.
In hindsight, I would have told her that I don’t think I know what normal is anymore. I don’t know if I ever did.
“Sal.”
In hindsight, I had an answer.
“Tell me.”
&nb
sp; But at that moment, when her eyes were big and fractured and full of tears…
“Please.”
I said nothing.
I said nothing when she dropped her hands from my face.
I said nothing when she turned around and walked away.
I said nothing as I watched her disappear.
And when the wind died to a whisper, I looked back to Lowstaff. I sat down on that hill. And I watched the freehold crumble as its fires died out, one by one.
SIXTY-ONE
HIGHTOWER
And then?”
Sal’s eyes were fixed on a scar upon the palm of her hand, her finger tracing its length, still old and sinewy even as tender flesh grew around it. She glanced up suddenly at Tretta.
“Huh?”
Tretta narrowed her eyes. “And then what?”
“Then what what?” Sal asked, oblivious.
“Then what happened?” Tretta had intended to sound significantly less incredulous and far more angry. “You killed Vraki, you let Jindu live, you watched Lowstaff be destroyed. What happened after that?”
“Oh.” Sal shrugged her shoulders. “Nothing.”
Tretta’s jaw set. “Not nothing.”
“Nothing.” Sal leaned back, shrugged. “I sat there on that hill until I saw someone in a blue coat come out.”
“A Revolutionary,” Tretta noted. “And then what?”
“And then there were a bunch of guns in my face, chains on my wrist, a long drive, and”—she held out her hands, as demonstrative as her manacles would allow—“here we are.”
“Here we are?” Tretta fell back to her seat, as though she had just been punched in the stomach. “You can’t be fucking serious.”
“Well, what were you expecting?” Sal asked.
“I… I don’t…” Tretta leaned forward on the table, brows furrowed as though she could suss out some pattern in the sense of the wood. “What happened to the Freemaker? Where did she go? What of Jindu the Blade? What about the rest of the Crown Conspiracy? What about Zanze the Beast?”
She seized the table’s edge as though she could simply snap it in two.
“What happened to Cavric?”
Sal shrugged. “Gone.”
Tretta’s mouth hung open. Her eyes forgot how to blink.
“Gone?”
“Vanished during the battle. Perhaps he fled. Or perhaps Vraki didn’t leave enough of him to be found. Either way, he’s gone.”
“Gone?” Tretta wanted to scream, but found she couldn’t find the breath for it. “It can’t simply end like that. All that time, all that talk and you just… just…”
“Unsatisfying, isn’t it?” Sal let out a black chuckle. “You always think it’ll be like it is in opera. Heroes victorious, or at least satisfactorily dead, and someone presumably kisses someone else at the end.” She looked up, glanced over Tretta appraisingly, and shrugged. “But that’s not really how it goes, is it?”
She looked back down at her hands, scarred and grimy, flecks of blood and dirt under her fingernails. She stared at them like she expected them to stare back at her and tell the rest of the story.
“Operas are better, though. Whether they end happily or not, they end. You don’t have to worry about what happened or what else might happen. No matter how many dead people are onstage, the curtain drops and you go back to living. But if you’re on the other side of that curtain…”
She curled her hands into fists, set them upon the table, and closed her eyes.
“All you’re left with are the bodies.”
A silence hung over the table. The same silence that follows a blade drawn, a body found cold in bed, a word spoken that can never be taken back. For a moment, Tretta was tempted to leave it at that, leave this woman and her tale to this room and go drink until she couldn’t hear the sound of a gun fired and a body hitting the floor.
“Birdshit.”
But she still had a job to do.
“Birdshit,” Tretta spat. “You expect me to believe that?”
“Well, I thought it was poignant.”
“When I first laid eyes upon you, I thought you another Vagrant, nothing more than a killer,” Tretta said. “But as we spoke, I thought there might be more to you, something deeper than the thousands of other killers roaming the Scar.”
“And now?” Sal asked.
“And now I see you’re both.” She thrust a finger accusingly at Sal. “The sole difference between you and the other scum crawling across the earth is that your depths have no end. There’s nothing you won’t do, no honor you won’t betray, no one you won’t kill to get what you want. Your farce of a confession is proof enough of that, if any of it is even true.”
“What, you think I made it all up for no reason?”
“I said you were scum, not stupid.” Tretta narrowed her eyes to skewers, pinned Sal to her chair with them. “You, who destroyed two cities to kill a handful of people, who deals with thieves and assassins, who ruins lives simply by showing up…” She shook her head. “Nothing you do is without reason. Neither is this. You’re plotting something.”
“Like what?” Sal laid both her hands on the table and regarded Tretta through a serene stare. “Like perhaps I struck a bargain with Alothenes? With Jindu? Like one of them has been tailing me this whole way and I’ve simply been biding time for a rescue to come crashing through that door right about…”
The reflected light of the lantern flickered in Sal’s eyes.
“Now?”
A breathless silence hung between them. And it took a moment for Tretta to realize she had grown tense. Some part of her—that small, niggling pain at the base of her neck that had kept her alive across a dozen battlefields—bade her to turn around, to draw her weapon and start firing on a door that was about to burst open, blazing with gunfire and magic. That pain spread down her spine, into her fingertips as she clutched the table, ready to leap out of her chair and start shooting.
Right up until Sal started smiling anyway.
“Yeah,” she said. “That would have been pretty good, wouldn’t it?”
Tretta felt like the correct answer was to snarl a curse or, even better, just shoot her. She was surprised to find that, as the tension leaked out of her in a tired sigh, all she could manage was a weary nod.
“It would have.”
There should have been rage, she knew. Rage for the time wasted, for the lives lost, for Cavric gone, and for the senseless destruction and endless suffering that followed in this woman’s wake. If it was true, if any of it was true, then the dead demanded that much of an answer.
And yet, Tretta could simply stare. And ask.
“Why did you tell me this, then?” She folded her arms over her chest. “Why any of it?”
Sal’s smile was as long and as slow and as sad as the last broken string on an old harp.
“Like I said at the beginning.” She looked down at her hands. “This is all I’m going to leave behind.” She reached up, traced the scar over her eye with two fingers. “Even before this, before the gun, before the list, I didn’t have much to my name but corpses. It’s only gotten worse since then. This story, what I did, is all I have left to give.”
She let her hands drop. She closed her eyes.
“Everything else is just dust and scars.”
Rather annoying, Tretta thought, that Sal should wait until now to be interesting.
It galled her to even be interested in this killer. And yet, her voice, her words, hung over Tretta and settled upon her shoulders like snowfall. After all the carnage wrought by her namesake, Sal’s final gift should be words.
But perhaps that was fitting.
After all, was it not the Great General’s words that hung hallowed in the cadres across the Scar? Was it not the words of the great commanders of the Revolution that spurred the soldiers to battle? Were those words what gave Cavric Proud the strength to continue through his ordeal? Were words all that anyone ever really left behind?
A
philosopher could give an answer. Or perhaps a poet.
Tretta was simply a soldier with a duty.
Wordlessly, she rose out of her chair. She drew her hand cannon and circled around to Sal’s back. Without quite realizing that she had done it, let alone why, she reached down and placed a hand on Sal’s shoulder.
And pressed the barrel of the gun against the back of her head.
“No.”
There was the groan of wood against the floor. Sal rose out of her chair and turned around. Her smile was gone. Her eyes were hard as she looked into Tretta’s.
“If you kill me,” she said softly, “you look me in the eyes when you do it.”
There was the urge to backhand her for her audacity. No one, let alone a filthy Vagrant, gave an order like that to a Governor-Militant of the Revolution. Protocol demanded she be executed from behind. Pride demanded she be shot through the heart instead of the head.
Yet, for the second time, Tretta surprised herself.
Without another word, she placed the pistol against Sal’s head. She drew the hammer back and she looked into the eyes of a killer, a thug, a Vagrant.
Salazanca ki Ioril.
Red Cloud.
Sal the Cacophony.
And the woman looked back at Tretta.
And she did not blink.
Not until the explosion, anyway.
Tretta lowered the gun. The smell of smoke filled the air. The room seemed deathly silent for a moment.
And then the sirens started to wail.
She rushed to the cell’s window, peered up to see boots thundering across the street. Revolutionary soldiers barked orders as they sprinted toward the sound of the explosion, even as civilians ran screaming in the opposite direction. Through the sound of carnage, she could make out words like attack and eastern wall. She started to call out to the soldiers.
No one could hear her over the sound of the second explosion.
From her vantage, she saw a great plume of flame rise over the houses of the city, smoke lifting into the air on black wings. The sirens blared louder to be heard over the sounds of more screams, more orders, more boots. Through the chaos, she only barely heard the voice behind her speak softly.
